I looked at my watch. Seven minutes to go. We would not be late, dammit. "Come on, come on, I need the reports." My small GOTV team huddled around the table, using e-mail, gchat, text and phone calls to communicate with the far larger team in the field. They fired back to me numbers of phonecalls, numbers of volunteers and a series of other bits of critical information from each of the region's phonebanks. I scrawled the stats on a giant white board, while someone else typed into a spreadsheet to get the state by state results I was due to report up.
The numbers, the numbers. They needed the numbers in LA -- to send up to Chicago. We would do this frantic drill four times a day, each day of GOTV, until Election Day, when I lost count of how many times we did it.
One whiteboard. Gallons of coffee. Big sheets of paper taped to the wall, and more pages scatted on the table, tracked list info. A tangle of ethernet cables, powerstrips, and phone chargers covering the floor. And a handful of amazingly dedicated organizers sitting around a single table in a closed off room, permanently glued to their laptops and cell phones. For four days and the better part of four nights, this was my world.
I've been sharing my experience of working on the campaign during August, September and October. Today is GOTV - the first four days of November and the last four days of the campaign. I'll finish with some stories of the Aftermath. As I wrote in my earlier diaries:
There are some things I feel I can't share, either because they are other people's stories to tell, or because they really belong to the campaign. But what I can give you is a sense of what it felt like to me having a front row seat to history. And it will help me make sense of it too.
August began with a rapid-fire introduction to campaign life, and ended with the entrance of Sarah Palin. In between I had to build a structure and start running a field plan, while learning my new job at the same time. And August was probably the least intense month I experienced. . . .
September kicked off with an outpouring of post-Convention volunteer interest. September was also the launch of an intensive schedule of Camp Obama trainings - huge logistical challenges with even bigger personal and field payoff. By the end of September, the pressure was building and the challenges mounting. I was worried I couldn't keep up the pace. I should have known it would only get worse.
By late October, my teams and I had built a serious phonebanking machine, trained hundreds of new organizers, and scoured the Bay Area for talent we could deploy around the nation. Changes in goals, priorities and structure were coming fast and furious, testing everyone's flexibility. And I was trying to remember what my family looked like.
And GOTV? I would not have believed I could actually function on that little sleep, handling that much adrenaline, and under that much pressure. I rode a constant roller coaster of emotions. Despite being surrounded and supported by some of the best organizers I could ask for, I still felt isolated and alone. This was more responsibility than I had ever taken on before. By the time polls closed, it would take everything I had.
The goal
I got off the conference call and looked at the number I had just written down. 176,000 calls. Nearly double the region's prior best day ever, which was just the day before. We were expected to hit or beat that number every day, four days in a row, starting Saturday, November 1, and finishing on Election Day. I felt the lead weight of my responsibility descending on me again. I knew it was possible. But I also knew it would require a maximum effort from scores of people, and contributions from thousands more, to pull it off. And at the end of the day, it was me who would be accountable for the result.
I had another number, too. 3500. That was the number of two-hour phonebanking shifts, at an average 50 calls per shift, that it would take to hit that number. For the next week, our #1 job was to schedule GOTV phonebanking shifts - get commitments from enough volunteers to fill 3500 shifts a day for four days across the region.
I hauled out the white board and started listing our GOTV phone banks. I walked the RFO's and my lead data managers through each one - could they really handle the intensity of GOTV? Were the organizers strong enough? Would they get enough callers in? Some had already been breaking records, others had been struggling. Who would manage data entry? Were they fully trained and ready? Did they have reliable internet access and a printer, so we could switch lists on the fly?
I was ready to cross several of the smaller phonebanks off the list. Time was short, and the workload was overwhelming - I wasn't interested in small phonebanks that might be less dependable and need more support, when I had multiple very large ones running pretty smoothly. Couldn't we consolidate? Couldn't we ask volunteers from smaller phonebanks to come to the larger ones? But the RFO's lobbied hard for their organizers. They had been working with them for weeks to get them ready for GOTV, and these volunteers were eager to remain part of the team. The RFO's persuaded me to give everyone a chance. Saturday would be the test run. Anyone that couldn't keep up would be off the list the next day.
So we took 3500 shifts and 14 phonebanks and began to divide them up. Larger and stronger phonebanks got huge goals - as many as 500 shifts a day. Smaller ones still had to fill 75 or 100, when they had maybe filled 25 or 30 before. Up until now I had shared the weekend regional calling goal with the volunteer teams to help motivate them. Now I decided instead to give each phonebank just their volunteer goal. For five days, we passed out flyers, sent e-mails, and called almost every single volunteer in the database for the region. By Friday we were over quota for Saturday and Sunday but barely half full for Monday and Tuesday. We hoped the weekend would carry us through.
The GOTV Olympics
As I gathered my teams together for a final training session Friday night, the analogy was obvious to me. "This is like the Olympics" I told them. "We have been training for this moment, for these four days, since the spring of 2007." That was how long we had been organizing in California for Obama. Now it was time to put all that training to work, to go way beyond what we had ever achieved before, for four days of GOTV.
The GOTV plan would be a massive never before seen ground and phone operation. Our region had sent hundreds of our best organizers to the battleground states already to work on the ground. Now the out of state phonebanks would allow them to focus on going directly to voters at the door and get them to the polls. On Election Day, one of our volunteers tested a state hotline number we were giving out to voters who needed rides, discovering callers were patched through directly to an organizer's cell phone. "I'm sitting in my car right now - where can I pick you up?" That was just one example of how, by carrying so much of the phonebank load, we freed up critical resources in these states.
And thanks to our huge volunteer numbers, we would make more phone calls than had ever seemed possible. The campaign's plan, as I saw it, would not just assure a win, but a big, big, unassailable, unstealable, unquestionable win. It would take most or all of the purple to red battleground states, leaving the other side on the defensive for elections to come.
If we could pull it off.
If you build it, they will come
For weeks we had been building phone bank capacity to get ready for GOTV. We had scoured the Bay Area for spaces that could be converted temporarily to phonebanks for 100 people or more - from vacant unused commercial space to rented union halls and nonprofit office space. We rigged up wireless internet networks, put up campaign signs and scrounged up enough printers for each site. Volunteers even painted a beautiful HOPE mural over some graffiti outside one of the new phonebank sites.
Some had everything ready to go. Others required more creativity - like the empty warehouse where we brought in borrowed carpet to try and deaden the sound. One had no electricity the first day, but we managed with very long extension cords plugged into the space next door. One had no water and we abandoned it. One of my favorite GOTV phone banks was in the back of a coffee house in the Mission in San Francisco. Our Berkeley office found overflow space from the pizza place across the street and the nonprofit down the block. So now the region had 14 different large and smaller sites ready to go, from SF to Stockton, from Vallejo to Fremont, and lots of places in between.
The War Room
My Regional Field Organizers would spend GOTV out in the field, at the phonebanks, performing hands on management. They would each be responsible for multiple locations hitting their targets. I would be in a little room in front of a little screen, with a very small support team. The core staff of the regional command center would be just me, my Regional Data Manager, and a deputy for each of us.
In traditional campaign-speak our space would have been called a boiler room. I preferred to call it the "war room." This was partly because I had spent far more time as a litigator than a campaign professional, and this was what I usually called a space dedicated to a round the clock, mission critical endeavor. It was also perhaps in homage to the original Clinton War Room. I felt that we too were campaign innovators, although in the realm of field, not message. Finally, I though "war room" more closely captured how serious this fight felt to me and the uncharacteristically aggressive and violent imagery the campaign experience was bringing up for me.
We largely closed off the space, even abandoning our original plans to have more people there to help us out. I didn't want to worry about what information I needed to control. I wanted to be free to swear loudly and complain about the frustration of the moment without looking bad in front of the volunteers. We needed the ability to completely focus with no distractions.
From the moment phonebanks opened at 7 a.m. (hitting the East Coast time zones) until they shut down at 9 p.m. we were continuously on. When I took even a two minute break for the bathroom, I gave my phone to another member of the team. Wonderful volunteers brought in coffee and food. We did our best to understand in real time everything that was happening outside that room at all of our phonebanks so we could make good decisions and do all of the required reports. Sometimes things ran like clockwork. Other times, more like controlled chaos.
Not Your Usual Late Night Halloween Party
Friday night we gathered, laptops in tow, in the San Francisco field office to get everything ready to open the GOTV phonebanks. We had access to a space down the block for the Saturday war room at 6 a.m. the next morning. We had to figure out how to distribute lists - which would come at some as yet unknown hour of the night - set folks up with logins, and finalize the reporting and monitoring procedures we would be using.
I'd deputized one of my RFO's (you know him here as Fraggle) to help take on a big chunk of my unmanageable workload. He came up with an ingenious system of site-specific gmail accounts we would use to communicate with the GOTV manager at each phonebank. This volunteer had to be in front of their laptop continuously, so we could send new lists or get updates at any moment. We also created two outgoing gmail accounts - "Listmaster" and "Reportmaster" - one to send new lists and updates about calling, and one to request and receive reports. Online chat made it all go even faster.
Each phonebank would also have a core set of leaders to run all aspects of the site, including managing lists, data, training, and other volunteers. Virtually all the GOTV managers and the phonebank and data managers would commit to working from before 7 a.m. until after 9 p.m. every day of GOTV. These were stellar volunteers, many who had proven themselves over and over in the weeks before. My RFO's, RDM and I reviewed the team staffing every single phonebank to make sure we could rely on them. In a few cases, we weren't sure. Saturday would tell us the answer.
It was Halloween night. I'd had a brief glimpse of my kids in their costumes earlier, but no chance to go door to door with them. At that point I wasn't sure when I would see my family again. As it turned out, I would get only a couple of short visits with them until GOTV was over. And I would not sleep again in my bed at home (catching an hour or two at a time wherever I could) until November 5.
By around 1 a.m. it was clear this was going to be an all-nighter, and we left to fuel up at a local late night diner. The four of us sat in front of laptops, sustained by our critical elements of caffeine, red meat and mobile broadband cards. (Scotch would come later). While we were hard at work, we were surrounded by drunk people in Halloween costume who were having an entirely different kind of all-nighter.
Day 1: Shattered goal and Self
Despite no sleep, no showers and no real breakfast we carried on through the morning. But we were working out our systems and they were a bit ragged. We managed to hit the 4 hour reporting deadlines OK, but much of the time in between it felt like controlled chaos, or worse. We were all feeling constantly under pressure between the needs and demands of the staff in LA and Chicago for information about how we were doing, and how hard it was to know at any moment from the war room how things stood in so many different places.
We calculated and recalculated constantly how quickly phonebanks could chew up lists. That "burn rate" would tell me when I might run out and how much we needed next, and how many calls should go where. Ask for too much, and important calls would sit around uncompleted instead of going to another region who could make them. Ask for too little, and risk running out. As each new list arrived by e-mail, I had to make instant decisions about how much to send where, so each location had just enough and no excess. Then the team translated those into rapid fire specific instructions to individual phonebanks and sent them off. It was trial and error all day to figure out what we needed to know and how to get it from the phonebanks.
We took turns spelling each other for brief naps - I spent mine curled up in a near fetal position on the very hard floor of a nearby small conference room, falling instantly asleep and dragging myself back to consciousness with a painful effort.
But something was going phenomenally right outside the war room. Each time numbers came back, it was clear we were on track not just to hit but to shatter our goal. 200,000 was tantalizingly in reach. Even the phonebanks I doubted and the organizers with shorter track records had come through. Everyone rose to the occasion in amazing fashion. The huge investment by the RFO's, the phonebank leads and the teams paid off.
Phonebanks closed and and we added up the final tallies, ending just over the hoped for mark. I was thrilled with what we had done and completely overwhelmed with what it took to do it. I felt like the walking dead - my body begging for food, shower, and sleep, and my brain in full shut down mode.
I owed LA one last report that night but felt incapable of doing it without food and a few minutes under hot water. As I finally sat down and opened my laptop to deliver the information, my phone rang. The display flashed the state field director's name. The numbers, where are the numbers? I hung up without speaking, closed my laptop and my eyes and completely melted down.
For something like 40 straight hours I had more or less held it together, trying to project as much calm and control and positive energy to the teams as possible, trying to motivate maximum effort from everyone, and trying not to feel the pressure of my responsibility for this piece of the most important election of my lifetime. I was physically and mentally beyond my limit, and it cracked the fear and anxiety I had been living with for so long wide open. Tears flowing, I simply handed the phone to my RDM when it rang back. "You talk to her." I couldn't, and couldn't really explain why. We had succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, but at tremendous cost. And very soon we would get up and do it all over again. At that moment, I wasn't sure I was actually capable of that.
Day 2: Nearly Perfect
It turns out I could in fact get through the second day, thanks to a few more hours sleep, another blast of hot water and a large amount of black coffee.
Well fueled by caffeine, Sunday practically hummed. We were based in Berkeley that day, having closed off the quiet second floor of the field office. We had worked out many of the kinks, and we had a much better system for tracking information. Volunteers flooded into the phonebanks and we put up even better numbers than the day before. People were sitting on floors in San Francisco, in folding chairs on the sidewalk in Berkeley, and spilling out into the alleyway behind the Mission coffeehouse phonebank - as you can see in this great photograph (#5 in montage). I even got a brief chance to run the five minutes to my home, say hi to my family, and grab a few changes of clothing. We were totally on track. In two more days it would all be over.
Day 3: 36 Hours Phonebank to Victory Party
Sunday night we packed up and moved the War Room, and everything we needed to run a giant phonebanking operation, from pens to printers, over to the Oakland Convention Center. We had rented the entire exhibit hall starting early Monday morning for a 300 person phone GOTV bank. Our practice runs in the parks proved we could manage on a large scale and I was eager to see how the system would perform. We would be staying there until Wednesday morning, although sleep and showers would frequently be nearby but just out of reach. After the polls closed Tuesday, the phonebank space would become the election night party. I liked the meaning of that - we would work for it first. And it meant we could keep the phonebank running until the very last possible moment.
I symbolically listed the phonebank hours as open continuously from 8 a.m. Monday until 8 p.m. Tuesday - a 36 hour GOTV marathon. We wouldn't call in the middle of the night, of course, but we recruited students to come for a "Pajamas for Obama" event. They would make signs and do early morning flyering runs advertising the phonebank. We would start calling East Coast voters at 5 a.m. California time on Election Day, assuming we could get volunteers there to do it.
The day started off badly on Monday, with press arriving early and me frantically trying to roll out of bed after an hour or two of sleep and look reasonable for a camera on ten minutes notice. The space we had planned for our war room had no cell phone reception and I wandered the hotel with my phone, looking for a place we could use. In the end we took over a suite graciously relinquished by a volunteer, set up our usual traveling network with a router hooked to the room's internet connection, and brought in the white board. With a bottle of scotch on the counter ready to be opened on election night, and room service and volunteers to deliver food and coffee, we were in back in business.
But the day was a struggle. Volunteer flow was down from the weekend, and we risked coming in under our target. I was trash talking about LA and Chicago over directives I disagreed with. Conversations with the state director felt tense. We were down to the wire and every problem seemed magnified many times over.
The day was ending for me in anger and frustration as I couldn't get lists fast enough to keep up. By 6 p.m., we had done so much that we literally ran out of phone numbers to call. This felt like a horrible disaster to me. "No f*cking lists!" I fumed. I was positive in public and furious in private. Three hours of wasted phoning time with volunteers at the ready. "It's the night before the election - isn't there somebody, somwhere we should be calling?!" In the end it probably didn't matter that much. My teams and phonebank managers improvised admirably, calling through earlier voter lists again, and doing Power of 5 recruitment calls to try to pack phonebanks for the following day.
In a few hours polls would open in Virginia, Ohio, and Florida. We had worked so hard to prepare for this. Would we have calls to make? Would enough people show up? Would anything really crazy happen?
Election Day: Firing on All Cylinders
At 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning I heard the alarm on my phone going off. I had just barely closed my eyes, and strained to pull myself to consciousness. I pulled on a hat and an Obama shirt and stumbled downstairs to the Convention Center floor to welcome and thank the 5 a.m. callers. Amazingly enough, there were about 20 people already there ready to make calls. I ordered coffee and food from the hotel for the volunteers running the phonebank and returned to the war room to see what was happening. We were worried about a thousand contingencies and catastrophes but so far things remained remarkably calm. All the phonebanks opened and began reporting back. By mid morning, we were packed across the region and burning tens of thousands of calls an hour. Returning to the Convention Center floor for a peek I saw the sleepy few dozen phoners transformed into a room full of callers, and scores more standing in clusters being trained.
The pace picked up. Orders and changes came down to us rapid fire, faster and faster. We asked the phonebanks to switch from state to state in a matter of minutes. At our burn rate, a 30 minute delay in printing a list and getting it out on the floor would mean making thousands fewer calls - it was a race against the clock as each state closed its polls. Even the huge Convention Center space turned on a dime, completing a massive priority list in less than an hour after we got it by e-mail, and then doing it again for another state. I was ecstatic. It was as if we had built a high performance race car (out of duct tape and borrowed folding tables no less) and then handed Chicago the keys, so they could drive it wherever they needed to go.
We closed out Missouri, then Colorado and New Mexico. By this point we had moved our laptops to the Convention Center floor. A giant TV screen was running the latest reports with no sound as we called from state to state, following the sun rolling across time zones. As each set of new states closed at the top of the hour, we suspended phoning for a couple of minutes to watch the anchors make the calls. But then everyone got back on the phones for the next list. (Here's some video of the Convention Center that captures some of the sense of that day).
People were pouring in to watch and celebrate, and I got nervous about holding the phonebank together. I walked around the TV screens asking people "do you want to watch history, or make it?" At about 6 p.m. California time, Ohio had been called, but the Nevada polls would be open an additional hour. No parties yet - we had to stay with it. The state director told us she had just heard directly from Barack Obama himself, asking California to keep calling and stay on the phones. (Late edit: Apparently this didn't actually happen, in the chaos of the last hours of Election Day we totally misinterpreted what she said!) At 7 we would be done, I thought. I can hold them until 7.
"AK is next" read the e-mail a few minutes later. Alaska?! Yes, absolutely, we should make more calls to push the Senate race, but would the volunteers hold out? Would they stay on the phones? This vignette from the Contra Costa Times blog about our Berkeley phonebank captured what was happening all over:
At the Northern California Obama HQ...on Adeline Street in Berkeley, where volunteers are crammed in tightly around folding tables, calling Colorado voters to get out the vote. A cheer went up here a short while ago as a field organizer announced National Public Radio had called Pennsylvania and New Hampshire for Obama; now that same organizer is telling everyone Obama himself called the California field director to implore volunteers to stay on the phones.
Frankly, it looks as if you’d have to drag these people away in chains to get ‘em off the phones before the polls close. They’re hunkered down with cell phones, snatching bites and sips between calls, ringing desk bells every time they hang up on a voter committed to Obama.
Now they’ve got ABC News on a projection screen... They’re so hungry for news from back east, and yet so determined to cram as many calls as they can into the time they have left, they barely know where to turn.
At 7:21 p.m., the networks had yet to formally call it, but I did, sending a final e-mail message to all the phonebanks:
from R2 Reportmaster GOTV <reportmastergotv@gmail.com>
date Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:21 PM
subject CONGRATULATIONS YOU ROCK!!!!
Crazy numbers - final tomorrow - CA over 1.5 million (way over).. . .
Your commitment is amazing - everyone is still here and reporting!!!!
We're done guys, come to the Convention Center and celebrate the moment.
Barack Obama is your new President.
In a little more than a half hour California would get called and fittingly put Obama over the top officially. But we had already blown through all the Alaska calls, there was nothing left to do. I heard later that in San Francisco they still didn't want to leave, asking if there were any more phone calls they could make. Only then did they agree to shut down and come to the party. I have no doubt that same scene repeated itself across the region.
In four days of GOTV, thousands of incredibly dedicated volunteers from 6 Bay Area Congressional Districts in California made nearly 900,000 phone calls, including over 300,000 on Election Day itself, to every single battleground state. Hundreds of volunteer organizers worked almost nonstop for four days as leaders and managers of the operation. We did everything Chicago asked - moving from state to state in a matter of minutes, taking as many calls as they could throw at us and asking for more. And as a recent HuffPo Off the Bus piece explains, this same thing happened all over the state of California, generating ten million phone calls between the end of the Convention and Election Day, 2 million on Election Day itself.
We called and we got out the vote. We talked to voter after voter who needed a ride, who needed to know where to go, who didn't know it was election day, who didn't know the polls were still open, or who just needed that extra push to get out the door and go. We made a difference.
When I sent that e-mail at 7:21 p.m., I could not have been happier. I was high as a kite. The NorCal director and I called the volunteers up to the front of the Convention Center and thanked them. I officially closed the phone bank, and announced the final numbers. Only a few minutes later, the whole place would erupt in pandemonium as the networks called the election.
And I would be astonished to discover that I was numb, detached and unable to respond. I was completely emotionally empty - I had left it all on the field. It would turn out to be a surreal election night party, one far different than I ever expected.
Next - The Aftermath - An Unexpected Election Night - The Clean Up - Trading One Set of Responsibilities for Another - What Now? - Return to Equilibrium - Change.
